The Blind Side (5 page)

Big Tony would have preferred Steven to become an NBA point guard. Still, he didn’t consider Betty Boo’s request unreasonable. Steven was one of the best students in his class, and always had been. There wasn’t any difficulty in Memphis finding a school that offered a Christian education: the nation’s largest private school system had sprung up in the mid-1970s, in East Memphis, to do just that. The problem was that Steven wasn’t the only child living in Tony’s small house. Occasionally, one of the boys from Hurt Village would crash on his floor; but a few months before, a boy came to stay the night and never left. His name was Michael Oher, but everyone just called him “Big Mike.” Tony liked Big Mike, but he also could see that Big Mike was heading at warp speed toward a bad end. He’d just finished the ninth grade at a public school, but Tony very much doubted he’d be returning for the tenth. He seldom attended classes, and showed no talent or interest in school. “Big Mike was going to drop out,” said Big Tony. “And if he dropped out, he’d be like all his friends who dropped out: dead, in jail, or on the street selling drugs, just waiting to be dead or in jail.”

Tony decided that as long as he was taking Steven out on this search for a Christian education, he should take Big Mike, too. Just a few days after he buried his mother, he put Steven and Big Mike in his car, and drove east. White Memphis had use for a great variety of Christian schools: Harding Christian Academy, which had been around forever; Christian Brothers, which was Catholic and all male; and the Evangelical Christian School, known as ECS. ECS was as close to a church as a school could get. ECS wouldn’t accept kids unless both parents gave testimony of their experience of being Born Again—and the stories better be good. Finally, and furthest east, was the Briarcrest Christian School. Briarcrest, also evangelical, was as far east as you could get and still be in Memphis. Briarcrest, more than the others, had been created to get away from Big Tony.

From the point of view of its creators, Briarcrest was a miracle. Its founder, Wayne Allen, had long been distressed by the absence of the Bible from public schools; the white outrage over busing was a chance to do something about it. In the year after the court decision—on January 24, 1973—that forced the city to deploy 1,000 buses to integrate the public schools, the parents of white children yanked more than 7,000 children out of those schools. From the ashes arose an entire, spanking new private school system. The Briarcrest Christian School—originally named the Briarcrest Baptist School—was by far the biggest. It was a system unto itself: fifteen different campuses, inside fifteen different Baptist churches. Its initial enrollment was just shy of 3,000 children, and every last one of them was white. By the summer of 2002 Briarcrest had a handful of black students, but these tended to be, like the black families in the fancy white neighborhoods, imports from elsewhere. The school had existed in East Memphis for nearly thirty years and yet no one who worked there could recall a poor black person from the west side of Memphis marching through its front door to enroll his child. Big Tony was the first.

All Tony knew about Briarcrest was that John Harrington was the basketball coach who had coached in the public schools, where Tony had met him. But any doubt that the Briarcrest Christian School served up the sort of education Betty Boo had in mind was allayed by the sight of the passage from the Book of Matthew inscribed on the outside of the main building: With men this is impossible; with God all things are possible. Two very lost-looking boys at his heels, Big Tony marched beneath it and inside the building and went hunting for the basketball coach.

JOHN HARRINGTON HAD SPENT two decades coaching in the public schools and was about to begin his first year at Briarcrest. When Big Tony walked into his office, unannounced, Harrington knew he couldn’t do anything for him. The problem presented by Big Tony was too large for the new guy. They chatted for a few minutes and then Harrington sent him over to see the senior coach at Briarcrest, Hugh Freeze. Freeze was only thirty-three, and with his white-blond hair and unlined face might have passed for even younger than he was—if he weren’t so shrewd. His shrewdness was right on the surface, so it had an innocent quality to it, but it was there just the same. Slow to speak and quick to notice, Hugh Freeze had the gifts of a machine politician. He was a man of God—if he hadn’t been a football coach, he said, he’d have liked to have been a preacher—but he was also, very obviously, adept at getting his way on earth without any help from the Almighty. He’d coached at Briarcrest for eight years, taken the boys’ football team to the Tennessee State Championship game five years in a row, and the girls’ basketball team to the last seven state championship games, where they had won four of them. This year his girls were ranked ninth in the nation. Freeze was at his desk preparing for the first day of the new school year when his secretary alerted him to the presence of someone who insisted on calling himself “Big Tony.”

In walks this 400-pound black man in a mechanic’s shirt with a little white name tag that says: Big Tony. This huge man introduces himself as Big Tony—again, no last name—and proceeds to tell Hugh about Steven. “He told me about his son, and how he wanted more for him than the school he was at,” said Freeze. “I told him how admirable that was but he had to understand that it cost a lot of money to go to Briarcrest, and not everyone got in. You had to have good grades. Big Tony said he knew about the cost and the grades; but Steven was an honor student and he was able to pay whatever the financial aid didn’t cover.” Freeze gave him the financial aid forms and thought: Good luck. That’s when Tony said, “And Coach, I’ve also got one of Steven’s friends.” He told him about Big Mike, a basketball player who, in Big Tony’s modest opinion, might also be of use to the Briarcrest football team.

“Where are his parents?” asked Freeze. He felt a twinge of interest. If a man who weighed 400 pounds was referring to someone else as “Big Mike,” he’d like to see the size of that someone else.

“It’s a bad deal, Coach,” said Tony. “No Dad, Mom’s in rehab. I’m pretty much all he has.”

“Who is the guardian?” asked Freeze. “Who has legal authority over him?”

“The mom.”

Big Tony said he could get Big Mike’s mom to fill in the forms, then just sat there, a bit uneasily. Finally, he asked, “You want to meet them?”

“The boys are here?”

“Right outside.”

“Sure,” said Freeze, “bring ’em on in.” Tony went out and came back with Steven. Hugh sized him up: almost six feet, and maybe as much as 180 pounds. Plenty big enough for the Briarcrest Christian School Saints football team. “But where’s the other one?” he asked.

“Big Mike! Come on in here!”

Hugh Freeze will never forget the next few seconds. “He just peeks around the corner, with his head down.” Hugh didn’t get a good first look—it was just a sliver of him but it suggested an improbably large whole. Then Michael Oher stepped around the corner and into his office.

Good God! He’s a monster!

The phrase shrieked inside Hugh’s brain. He’d never seen anything remotely like this kid—and he’d coached against players who had gone to the NFL. When football coaches describe their bigger players, they can sound like ranchers discussing a steer. They use words like “girth” and “mass” and “trunk size.” Hugh wasn’t exactly sure of the exact dimensions of Big Mike—six five, 330 pounds? Maybe. Whatever the dimensions, they couldn’t do justice to the effect they created. That mass! That…girth! The kid’s shoulders and ass were as wide as his doorway. And he’d only just turned sixteen.

“How can I get their transcripts?” asked Hugh.

Big Tony said he’d go get them and bring them in person.

Then Hugh tried to make conversation with this man-child. “I couldn’t get him to talk to me,” he said. “Not a word. He was in a shell.”

A few days later, Big Tony delivered the transcripts to Hugh Freeze. Steven, as advertised, was a model student and Briarcrest could see no reason not to supply him with a Christian education. Big Mike was another story. Hugh was a football coach and so he tended to take an indulgent view of bad grades, but he had no pleasant category in his mind for Big Mike’s. “I knew it was too good to be true,” he said. He sat on the transcript for two days, but he knew that eventually he’d have to hand it over to Mr. Simpson, the principal, to pass judgment. But his wheels already were spinning.

Steve Simpson, like John Harrington, was new to Briarcrest. He’d spent thirty of his fifty-six years working in the Memphis Public School system. When you first met him, you thought that whatever happened next it wasn’t likely to be pleasant. His social manner was, like his salt-and-pepper hair, clipped short. He had the habit of frowning when another would have smiled, and of taking a joke seriously. But after about twenty minutes you realized that though the hard surface was both thin and brittle, beneath was a pudding of sentiment and emotion. He teared up easily, and was quick to empathize. When you mentioned his name to people who knew him well, they often said things like, “Steve Simpson has a heart that barely fits in this building.” When teachers came to Briarcrest from the public schools, they often felt liberated, and took great pleasure in advertising their Christian faith. When Simpson arrived in this new place, he placed front and center on his desk a framed passage from the Bible that he never would have placed on his public school desk. But it was special to him:

And God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that by always having enough of everything, you may share abundantly in His good works.

—II CORINTHIANS 9:8

Still, when the file on Michael Oher from the Memphis City School system hit his desk, Simpson was frankly incredulous. The boy had a measured IQ of 80, which put him in mankind’s 9th percentile. An aptitude test he had taken in the eighth grade had measured his “ability to learn” and ranked him in the 6th percentile. The numbers looked like misprints: in a rich white private school, under the column marked “percentile,” you never saw single-digit numbers. Of course, logically, you knew such people must exist; for someone to be in the 99th percentile, someone else had to be in the 1st. But you didn’t expect to meet them at the Briarcrest Christian School. Academically, Briarcrest might not be the most ambitious school. It spent more time and energy directing its students to Jesus Christ than to Harvard. But the students all went on to college. And they all had at least an average IQ.

In his first nine years of school Michael Oher had been enrolled in eleven different institutions, and that included a hole of eighteen months, around the age of ten, when he apparently did not attend school at all. Either that or the public schools were so indifferent to his presence that they had neglected to register it formally. But it was worse than that. There were schools Big Tony mentioned that did not even appear on the transcripts. Their absence might be explained by another shocking fact: the boy seldom showed up at the schools where he was enrolled. Even when he received credit for attending, he was sensationally absent: forty-six days of a single term of his first-grade year, for instance. His first first-grade year, that is—Michael Oher had repeated first grade. He’d repeated second grade, too. And yet Memphis City Schools described these early years as the most accomplished of his academic career. They claimed that right through the fourth grade he was performing at “grade level.” How could they know when, according to these transcripts, he hadn’t even attended the third grade?

Simpson knew what everyone who had even a brief brush with the Memphis public schools knew: they passed kids up to the next grade because they found it too much trouble to flunk them. They functioned as an assembly line churning out products never meant to be market-tested. At several schools Michael Oher had been given F’s in reading his first term, and C’s the second term, which allowed him to finish the school year with what was clearly an ignoramus’s D. They were giving him grades just to get rid of him, to keep the assembly line moving. And get rid of him they did: seldom had the boy returned to the school that had passed him the year before. His previous year, in the ninth grade, he’d spent at a high school called Westwood. According to his transcripts, he’d missed fifty days of school. Fifty days! Briarcrest had a rule that if a student missed fifteen days of any class he had to repeat the class no matter what his grade. And yet Westwood had given Michael Oher just enough D’s to move him along. Even when you threw in the B in world geography, clearly a gift from the Westwood basketball coach who taught the class, the grade point average the boy would bring with him to Briarcrest began with a zero: 0.6.

If there was a less promising academic record, Mr. Simpson hadn’t seen it—not in three decades of working with public school students. Mr. Simpson guessed, rightly, that the Briarcrest Christian School hadn’t seen anything like Michael Oher, either. And yet here he was, courtesy of the football coach, seated across the desk staring hard at the floor. The boy seemed as lost as a Martian stumbling out of a crash landing. Simpson had tried to shake his hand. “He didn’t know how to do it,” he said. “I had to show him how to shake hands.” Every question Simpson asked elicited a barely audible mumble. “I don’t know if ‘docile’ is the right word,” Simpson said later. “He seemed completely intimidated by authority. Almost nonverbal.” That, in itself, Simpson found curious. Even though Michael Oher had no business applying to Briarcrest, he showed courage just being here. “It was really unusual to see a kid with those kinds of deficits that wanted an education,” he said. “To want to be in this environment. A lot of kids with his background wouldn’t come within two hundred miles of this place.”